Sandra Olim

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Investigator at Instituto Técnico de Lisboa

In a world of increasing environmental degradation, there is an urgency to promote care for nature. UNESCO advocates that by 2025 the integration of environmental education is an essential element in all countries, to actively contribute towards the well-being of the planet and adopt sustainable lifestyles. One way to combine both these goals is to...

Food waste is an issue of high relevance to all countries around the globe. Many entities and governments work towards finding a solution to decrease or minimise the waste from its production to food consumption. Due to this impact, reducing food waste has also been implemented as a sub-goal of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Seve...

Children’s interest in new technologies and games creates opportunities to use these tools to facilitate their thinking processes for scientific content and education, especially to support abstract reasoning in the areas of Science, Technology, Engineering, Maths (STEM). Chemistry concepts, in particular, can benefit from being presented through h...

This pictorial presents Periodic Fable (PF), an educational game’s design and graphic interface that promotes a constructivist approach to engage young children with Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) subjects. The game presents children with scientific content supported with an exploratory activity using physical cubes manipulable t...

Augmented Reality (AR) applications have the potential to improve students’ Chemistry learning performance. By identifying the unique features and affordances of this technology, we can design more effective tools to facilitate the learning process of abstract concepts. We developed Periodic Fable in the Wild, an AR serious game as an instrument to...

As climate change and biodiversity loss are threatening the natural world’s equilibrium and survival, people’s concerns about these topics have increased significantly. The work presented in this paper lies at the cross-section between the areas of education, biodiversity and technologies. More specifically, this project builds on research in virtu...

Teenagers are a large pool of potential museum audiences. This age group is identified as an audience group that is often excluded from a museum’s curatorial strategies [1] and appears to be generally disinterested in what museums might offer [2]. Without some degree of digital interactivity, it is challenging for a museum to remain interesting and...

Chemistry is often regarded as a complex and demanding subject for youth to learn, partly because of abstract concepts that are challenging to depict. These areas require spatial reasoning, defined as the ability to retain, generate and manipulate abstract visual images in space, either physically or mentally. By allowing the superimposition of vir...

While museums are making great efforts in updating their communication and engagement strategies to include a wide variety of publics, teenagers (15–19) are still identified as an audience group that is often excluded from a museum’s curatorial strategies. As consequence, this audience appears to be generally disinterested in what museums might off...

This paper investigates whether location and medium affect the experience of interactive storytelling in the context of mobile Virtual Reality systems. For this purpose, we discuss the development of Fragments of Laura, a location-aware multimedia application in a larger interactive transmedia story, where users can view a 360° narrative in a 3D en...